The New Idea

Billy believes the youth climate change movement will take off when students at universities across the country are equipped with the proper tools and resources to work on a common agenda. He recognized that while many students were interested in addressing the climate crisis through their schools, most campus-based environmental groups were disconnected. Billy’s idea unites these disparate student groups into a single coordinated, and more effective, effort that helps youth on each campus make their college a climate-neutral model of sustainability. Based on his work with colleges, Billy organized a summit of 17 organizations across the United States and Canada to form the Energy Action Coalition (EAC), leveraging their collective power to achieve a clean, efficient, just, and renewable energy future.

Billy believes young people can and must make building a green economy the unifying, defining issue of their generation. His goal is for EAC to engage people in practical, effective solutions to environmental challenges. In the process, the coalition will create a new generation of private, public, and citizen sector leaders. This student movement brings new vitality to the work of pioneering environmentalists through a hopeful, solutions-oriented, and achievable agenda.

Billy saw that academic institutions could be a powerful intellectual and economic force. If institutions of higher education achieve climate neutrality, their collective impact will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond that, their leadership will influence students, faculty, vendors, employees, corporations, and communities to adopt environmentally friendly practices. To move from “climate harmful” to “climate neutral,” for example, colleges will have to examine and consider changing almost every aspect of institutional operations. Billy believes this change will only occur if clean energy advocates speak in one voice across many institutions to increase and sustain public pressure, achieve a supportive public policy framework, and offer practical solutions.

The Problem

In February 2007, the International Panel on Climate Change released its Fourth Assessment Report, describing the expected impacts of global warming: Huge disruptions to agriculture, floods, droughts, heat waves, desertification, violent storms, and melting glaciers. Sea levels will rise, coastal flooding will increase, and oceans will become so acidic that some reefs will dissolve. These changes will create hundreds of millions of “climate refugees,” and will cause water scarcity for billions of people by the century’s end. Hundreds of millions of people will also experience food scarcity. To avoid this scenario, global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced significantly by 2050. They must peak and start declining within the next 10 years.

The United States, where Billy lives, is the leading emitter of greenhouse gases, contributing more than 25 percent of global emissions with only 4 percent of the global population. Rather than taking the lead in finding global solutions, the United States stalled international efforts to address the problem for many years. Canada is also a top emitter of greenhouse gases.

The American higher education sector is a $317B per year industry that employs millions of people, maintains thousands of buildings, and owns millions of acres of land. It spends billions of dollars on fuel, energy, and infrastructure. College and university campuses are responsible for 4 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet when Billy began his work, only a few of the 4,400 U.S. campuses had a comprehensive plan and timetable to reduce greenhouse emissions substantially and achieve energy independence. Just four years later, 585 colleges had committed to becoming climate neutral, a pace of success far beyond Billy’s initial dreams.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently observed that the world’s poorest people “will suffer the most, even though they are the least responsible for global warming.” Similarly, young people and future generations will suffer from a problem they did not create. In the United States and Canada, advocacy to slow climate change has been led by conservation and science-oriented organizations, whose members are largely upper-middle class Caucasians. These groups have not effectively used a moral framework to define the problem, and have not offered a positive vision that connects to people’s values. The most affected constituencies have not been engaged in solving the problem. Most Americans don’t know how they could reverse the current climate trends or what reforms policymakers and institutions should adopt to turn the situation around. No cohesive, future-oriented citizen movement has emerged.

The Strategy

Billy founded the Energy Action Coalition in June 2004 to increase the effectiveness of hundreds of student environmental initiatives by providing a unified structure to share ideas, best practices, and resources. The EAC works in four strategic areas: Campuses, communities, corporate practices, and politics. Its first coordinated initiative, The Campus Climate Challenge, aims to make campuses energy independent and dramatically reduce their impact on global warming. EAC members choose to work first on changing the practices of the institutions they know best where they have the most influence. Since universities are centers of innovation as well as major employers in their communities, they can set the pace for change by implementing alternative energy, energy efficiency, and sustainability projects to demonstrate their feasibility and impact.

Billy astutely matched the program to the population and the problem. EAC’s structure is well suited to a youth-led movement. It is governed by consensus, with a steering committee and both permanent and ad hoc working groups. Each prospective partner must meet certain criteria to join, but maintains its own identity and affiliations. The campus groups come together to gain more clout and move their shared agenda forward. For example, in 2007, 16 coalition partners held a joint fundraising effort, raising $2.1M to run The Campus Climate Challenge. This allowed the EAC to hire 5 central staff and more than 70 full-time-equivalent staff to help student groups advance different parts of the agenda. The budget nearly doubled the following year. Resources are raised and budgeted collectively, with central staff managing the fundraising, budgeting, application, and allocation processes. The coordinating staff, led by Billy, includes a “digital organizer” (blogging, web design, and technology), an operations manager, and a partnerships and alliances director, who works on expanding EAC’s network, particularly by engaging environmental justice and historically underserved groups.

As of 2008, student groups at 622 schools had signed up to take part in The Campus Climate Challenge. By 2010, EAC plans to recruit and train 10,000 youth leaders from diverse backgrounds to lead The Campus Climate Challenge. EAC is reaching out to environmental justice and faith-based organizations, as well as youth who are not students. It hosts national conferences, including a national job fair to help youth find jobs that align with their environmental values. EAC aims to create life-long leaders committed to advancing climate goals and energy justice. It will build the capacity and understanding of student groups to promote sustainable living and be effective agents of change on their campuses. Billy is working with Ashoka Fellow Van Jones and others to create a “green jobs” program similar to the Civilian Conservation Corps or AmeriCorps.

To gain top-level support for this challenge, Billy and his colleagues came up with the idea of having university leaders sign a pledge that gives them some ownership over the student-led effort. At the end of 2008, more than 585 leaders of academia had signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, which pledges them to develop an institutional action plan for becoming climate neutral, produce short and long-term goals to reduce greenhouse gases, advance shareholder climate and sustainability proposals to companies in which their endowment is invested, and keep a publicly accessible tracking mechanism. A majority of these colleges have hired sustainability managers. Students issue annual report cards on the progress of their campus. With Brian Siu of the Apollo Alliance, Billy coauthored New Energy for Campuses: Energy Saving Technologies for Colleges and Universities.

By 2010, The Campus Climate Challenge aims to engage 1 million students on 1,000 campuses and help them secure 1,000 new signatories to the Presidents’ Climate Commitment. EAC also aims to pass comprehensive policies for climate neutrality, education, research, and community relations on 250 campuses. Billy expects that one way universities will promote clean energy is by buying high-quality local carbon offsets and investing the funds in projects such as weatherizing homes in low-income neighborhoods. These investments would save energy, benefit the local community, and improve “town and gown” relationships.

EAC’s public policy agenda calls for joining with other organizations (both domestic and abroad) to influence elections, and to establish an “adopt a rep” program in which students adopt and work closely with members of Congress to lobby for climate-friendly policies. In 2008, EAC ran an aggressive campaign called “Power Vote” to build a voting bloc of 1 million youth for the Presidential election.

The Person

Billy grew up in New York City, where his parents practiced law. He started out at a Montessori school, then went to a small private boys’ school from first grade through high school. He was “a golden child”—teachers loved him. He was a leader and moral compass in school, sports, and social groups. With a strong social conscience, he always stuck up for the underdog. His best friend, Jawn, was the only black student in his first grade class and the school kept the boys together year after year because Billy always protected Jawn.

In 11th grade, Billy spent a semester at The Mountain School in rural Vermont, where he lived and worked on an organic farm. The school had a strong environmental ethic and a social contract of mutual trust between students and adults. While there, Billy read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, which started him thinking about his purpose at a moment in history when human civilization was using resources at an unsustainable rate. He went on to pursue environmental studies at Yale University with a focus on globalization and economic injustice. Before his junior year, he spent a summer in India studying community forestry. His life changed when he hiked 35 miles to a glacier top in the Himalayas—the source of the Ganges River on which 400 million people rely—and saw it was rapidly melting. That summer India had floods, droughts, and record heat waves.

Billy decided to leave Yale to build a youth-led climate movement in the United States. He convened a Northeast climate summit that drew 70 participants and caused great excitement. There were some student networks in New England then, but they weren’t collaborating. He founded The Climate Campaign to bring them together. Four hundred students from 100 schools attended the first conference. In 2004, Billy founded Energy Action Coalition, which is sponsored by the Earth Island Institute, an environmental projects incubator.

Billy is married to Wahleah Johns, co-director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a Navajo and Hopi organization working on indigenous rights, youth empowerment, water, and global warming. Billy, Wahleah and their daughter live near Flagstaff, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Billy travels across the United States and Canada, mostly by train or on a school bus retrofitted to run on waste vegetable oil, to “bring more music into the movement” Billy partners with popular rock bands (e.g. Guster) and helped start Green Owl Records, which teamed up with Warner Bros. to issue a benefit CD series for EAC. He also partnered with MTV, which promotes The Campus Climate Challenge.

Billy says the science is conclusive, we have the technologies and know the policies we need—it’s time to do the work of transforming communities into models of sustainability, by empowering and training the next generation to effectively address the problem, and by building a movement for change. He fills notebook after notebook with ideas. For example, he is exploring the feasibility of a for-profit wind development energy company in North Dakota that he thinks could supply one-third of the electricity needs of the United States and support a clean energy training center for youth based on the model of the Highlander Center, the famous liberal leadership training school and cultural center in Tennessee.

When asked how he stays focused with so many ideas bubbling up, he smiled and said, “That’s what notebooks are for.” Bill McKibben, author and environmentalist, called Billy “One of the most powerful individuals I’ve ever come across.” Young people who care about the future of our planet appear to agree.